Saturation of auditory short-term memory causes a plateau in the sustained anterior negativity event-related potential

Alunni‐Menichini, Kristelle; Guimond, Synthia; Bermudez, Patrick; Nolden, Sophie; Lefebvre, Christine; Jolicœur, Pierre

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2014.09.047

Cited by 20 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…The present results show developmentally what some adult research has suggested: that working memory for tones shows a pattern similar to working memory for visual items, with a plateau after about 3 items are in memory (Alunni-Menichini et al, 2014; Li et al, 2013). Tone memory also shares some properties with memory for verbal stimuli (Gromko et al, 2009; Huntsinger, & Jose, 1991).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Tone series and the nature of working memory capacity development.

Clark¹,

Hardman²,

Schachtman³

et al. 2018

Developmental Psychology

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Recent advances in understanding visual working memory, the limited information held in mind for use in ongoing processing, are extended here to examine auditory working memory development. Research with arrays of visual objects has shown how to distinguish the capacity, in terms of the number of objects retained, from the precision of the object representations. We adapt the technique to sequences of nonmusical tones, in an investigation including children (6-13 years, N = 84) and adults (26-50 years, N = 31). For each series of 1 to 4 tones, the participant responded by using an 80-choice scale to try to reproduce the tone at a queried serial position. Despite the much longer-lasting usefulness of sensory memory for tones compared with visual objects, the observed tone capacity was similar to previous findings for visual capacity. The results also constrain theories of childhood working memory development, indicating increases with age in both the capacity and the precision of the tone representations, similar to the visual studies, rather than age differences in time-based memory decay. The findings, including patterns of correlations between capacity, precision, and some auxiliary tasks and questionnaires, establish capacity and precision as dissociable processes and place important constraints on various hypotheses of working memory development. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Tone series and the nature of working memory capacity development.

Clark¹,

Hardman²,

Schachtman³

et al. 2018

Developmental Psychology

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“…Differences in event-related potentials (ERP) between control and memory conditions were found during the retention interval, and the higher the memory load, the stronger was the ERP negativity. Similar findings have been reported by Alunni-Menichini et al (2014), who demonstrated that the same ERP component robustly indexes STM capacity. These results indicate that the retention of timbre requires an active, attention-dependent form of STM.…”

Section: Timbre Recognition In the Literaturesupporting

confidence: 90%

Short-term Recognition of Timbre Sequences

Siedenburg

McAdams

2018

Music Perception

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The goal of the current study was to explore outstanding questions in the field of timbre perception and cognition—specifically, whether memory for timbre is better in trained musicians or in nonmusicians, whether short-term timbre recognition is invariant to pitch differences, and whether timbre dissimilarity influences timbre recognition performance. Four experiments examined short-term recognition of musical timbre using a serial recognition task in which listeners indicated whether the orders of the timbres of two subsequently presented sound sequences were identical or not. Experiment 1 revealed significant effects of sequence length on recognition accuracy and an interaction of music training and pitch variability: musicians performed better for variable-pitch sequences, but did not differ from nonmusicians with constant-pitch sequences. Experiment 2 yielded a significant effect of pitch variability for musicians when pitch patterns varied between standard and comparison sequences. Experiment 3 high-lighted the impact of the timbral dissimilarity of swapped sounds and indicated a recency effect in timbre recognition. Experiment 4 confirmed the importance of the dissimilarity of the swap, but did not yield any pertinent role of timbral heterogeneity of the sequence. Further analyses confirmed the strong correlation of the timbral dissimilarity of swapped sounds with response behavior, accounting for around 90% of the variance in response choices across all four experiments. These results extend findings regarding the impact of music training and pitch variability from the literature on timbre perception to the domain of short-term memory and demonstrate the mnemonic importance of timbre similarity relations among sounds in sequences. The role of the factors of music training, pitch variability, and timbral similarity in music listening is discussed.

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“…In the present study, we took advantage of the fact that encoding new sensory information into working memory is capacity limited (11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16). Neuroscientific studies have established that the encoding of a subset of the available visual information into working memory can be measured by frequency-specific oscillations of subjects' electroencephalograms (EEGs) (17)(18)(19)(20).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual working memory buffers information retrieved from visual long-term memory

Fukuda

Woodman

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Human memory is thought to consist of long-term storage and shortterm storage mechanisms, the latter known as working memory. Although it has long been assumed that information retrieved from long-term memory is represented in working memory, we lack neural evidence for this and need neural measures that allow us to watch this retrieval into working memory unfold with high temporal resolution. Here, we show that human electrophysiology can be used to track information as it is brought back into working memory during retrieval from long-term memory. Specifically, we found that the retrieval of information from long-term memory was limited to just a few simple objects' worth of information at once, and elicited a pattern of neurophysiological activity similar to that observed when people encode new information into working memory. Our findings suggest that working memory is where information is buffered when being retrieved from long-term memory and reconcile current theories of memory retrieval with classic notions about the memory mechanisms involved.visual working memory | visual long-term memory retrieval | EEG H umans are capable of storing an essentially limitless amount of information in long-term memory and can remember specific pieces of information when needed to guide behavior. For over a century, researchers have proposed that, when humans retrieve information from long-term memory, we do this by bringing the information back into working memory (1-3). This has become so engrained in the dogma regarding how human memory works that retrieving information from long-term memory into working memory is described in introductory textbooks (e.g., refs. 4 and 5). However, although there is behavioral evidence in line with the notion that information retrieved from long-term memory is brought back into working memory (ref. 6; see ref. 7 for a review of additional classic evidence; refs. 8-10), a direct demonstration that this is occurring in brain is needed. If we were able to track this cognitive process, we could use it to understand the fine-grained dynamics of memory retrieval.In the present study, we took advantage of the fact that encoding new sensory information into working memory is capacity limited (11-16). Neuroscientific studies have established that the encoding of a subset of the available visual information into working memory can be measured by frequency-specific oscillations of subjects' electroencephalograms (EEGs) (17)(18)(19)(20). Specifically, the magnitude of suppression of alpha-band oscillations (8-13 Hz) measured across parieto-occipital channels as new information is held in working memory changes as additional information is loaded into working memory and hits an asymptote at a subject's working-memory capacity estimated from behavioral performance. We chose this neural correlate of working memory over other correlates (e.g., the contralateral delay activity in ref. 12) because it allowed the estimation of working-memory load without necessitating the presentation of to-be-ignored dis...

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Saturation of auditory short-term memory causes a plateau in the sustained anterior negativity event-related potential

Cited by 20 publications

References 45 publications

Tone series and the nature of working memory capacity development.

Tone series and the nature of working memory capacity development.

Short-term Recognition of Timbre Sequences

Visual working memory buffers information retrieved from visual long-term memory

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